Lists of records or queues are commonly used to collect and analyze data for a variety of applications. For example, queues may be used to store and track the status of claims issued by a medical services provider. A typical medical services provider, or a third-party acting on behalf of the medical services provider, processes a large volume of claims detailing expenses incurred by patients treated by the medical services provider. Each of these claims includes information and costs associated with one or more procedures or services provided to the patient, and which the medical services provider would like to recover payment. For many patients, payment is recovered by transmitting the claims to the patient's insurance provider or other payer who, in turn, evaluates the charges on the claim and remits the appropriate payment to the medical services provider. Ensuring that this payment process operates smoothly is important to the medical services provider to facilitate payment for the medical services provider's services in a timely manner.
Medical services providers process hundreds or thousands of claims a day. One way to facilitate tracking the status of these claims is to enter the claims as entries in a database which keeps track of, among other things, when the claims were sent and when remittance was received. Due to the large volume of claims being processed, a medical services provider may not receive a response for some claims even though the claims were submitted several weeks or months prior. For each claim in which a response was not received, a follow-up call is typically placed to the payer in order to determine why there was no response. If even a relatively small percentage of the claims do not receive a response, the number of follow-up calls required may be quite large, resulting in a process that is both time-consuming and costly for the medical services provider.